Tag Archives: digital media

The Myth of Successful Multitasking

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Source: Centers for Disease Control
                       Image: Centers for Disease Control

As researcher Clifford Nass famously noted, multitaskers are “suckers for irrelevancy.”  Because “everything distracts them,” their intellectual performance on important tasks deteriorates. 

As more of my students bring laptops and phones to class, their abilities to concentrate and retain even simple instructions delivered face to face seem to be under assault.  In many cases these are traditionally “strong” students: top-ranked in their high school classes, ambitious, and often intent on pursuing advanced degrees in medicine and other fields. Why are so many not retaining important conclusions or pieces of information?

There is no question a laptop is a great note-taking device. Many of us can type faster than we can write.  But one would have to believe in the tooth fairy to accept the premise that computers in the classroom are only used to deal with the material covered on a given day.  The sacred cow of full connectivity on campus makes it a virtual certainty that students may be placing their bodies in the classroom, but taking their minds elsewhere. Multi-tasking is the norm.  One Stanford faculty member notes that his research indicates a full quarter of his students are trying to use four different media at the same time while there are ostensibly focused on writing term papers.  We’ve all read the results of that kind of writing, and it’s usually not pretty.

The fundamental problem is that almost no one is good at multi-tasking.  We are simply not wired to split short-term memory between a variety of stimuli at once.  We may think otherwise. But there’s near unanimity in the literature on comprehension that critical thinking declines when we fragment our attention. To put it simply, multitasking makes us just a little bit stupid. As researcher Clifford Nass famously noted, multitaskers are “suckers for irrelevancy.”  Because “everything distracts them,” their intellectual performance on important tasks deteriorates.  Sometimes the person addicted to a digital stew of stimuli is the last to know that they have become intellectually impaired.  It’s a common mistake to assume that being “busy” means being “fully engaged.”  We perform our busyness as a badge of honor.  But it’s closer to the truth to conclude that the more we construct lives where external stimuli are a constant, the less we are able to get past the self-induced noise that complicates the completion of an important task.

Try a simple experiment.  Try to read your e-mail or a series of text-messages while also listening to someone explain how to get to an address on the other side of town.  No GPSs allowed. An active and full-time listener will probably process the directions correctly, or ask questions until they have the mental map they need.  The split-time listener is more likely to end up lost, often compounding their addiction to distracted multi-tasking by calling from from a moving car to get new directions.

Of course there are many significant exceptions to acknowledge: those from all walks of life who still have the will to track the explication of a complex idea for an extended period; younger readers happily caught in the thrall of a writer or literary genre; newspaper consumers who will follow an investigative story across three pages of a broadsheet; or the curious who are sufficiently engaged to listen to another for a sustained amount of time. But these individuals increasingly seem to be cultural outliers. We now tend to notice a special passion for thirsty listening and reading.  They stand out from the norm.

So the caution stands: the fragmentation of daily life into competing multiple activities undermines competencies we should want to nurture and protect.  The things worth doing in life –if they are truly worthy of our time–are too important to be compromised by incessant (and non-linear) distraction.  My guess is that Franz Joseph Haydn would have never gotten around to writing those fabulous hundred and six symphonies if he owned a smartphone and an e-mail account.  How would he have had the time?

Too Much Noise on the Line

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If you are old enough to remember The Carol Burnett Show and her famous remake of “Gone with the Wind,” you can probably also describe the momentary loss of picture or sound with some version of the phrase, “There’s too much static on the line.” We tend to see the world through the vocabulary we’ve acquired, so some form of this expression hangs around, even though we now think of it as a holdover from older forms of analogue media. Listen to AM radio today and there can be so much static that it may actually drown out a station. Scratches on an old 35-millimeter print of a film or dust lodged in a cherished vinyl LP are similar versions of the same problem: what audio engineers call a bad “signal-to-noise ratio.” It’s still true that if you still have a land-line phone, you may also find that there are times when you sound like Sheriff Andy Taylor trying to be heard over an old wall phone at the far end of Mayberry.

“Too much static on the line” might seem like a complaint whose time has passed. After all, digital media generally have the potential to strip a message of extraneous noise. But it would be a mistake to think that we’ve licked the problem, especially if we can see its significance in slightly larger terms. I’m struck by the fact that the very devices that carried the promise of freeing us from bad connections have done just the opposite. If anything, those weighed down with various forms of the latest digital devices are now assaulted with more stimulation than we can ever accommodate. In our age, the fragile line represented by a focused consciousness is easily overwhelmed by visual and aural noise.

Talk to a friend while they are surfing the internet or texting someone, and you sense that there’s definitely too much static on the line. Ask someone to do their desk job while they are also trying to process a barrage of useless e-mails, cell messages and Tweets, and they’ve got more than their powers of concentration and discernment can handle.

This has become a familiar and much-discussed issue, especially among older adults who see what they describe as the distractions and attention deficits of the young. To be sure, our children will survive, and no doubt help us tame the twin Twenty First Century monsters of information overload and empathy fatigue. But it’s also worth remembering that many enduring achievements in life tend to come in broad swaths of linear development. The mind works best when it has time to put our heads around a challenge and master its demands. We know this when we’ve finished a great novel, witnessed the performance of a sprawling but magnificent symphony, or taken in the words of a provocative thinker who was given a generous  space of time to lay out their views. To reduce these efforts to anything less—especially because of a felt need to accommodate more truncated bits of “information”—is to produce its own kind of mental static.

There’s an important lesson in the fact that a number of great composers wrote their best works in fevers of concentrated effort. It was continuous and sustained chains of invention that gave us the Jupiter Symphony and the gathering brilliance of The Messiah. We can be thankful that Mozart and Handel didn’t have the distractions of 24-hour cable news, Facebook pages to fret over, or e-mails waiting to be answered. It is undeniably true that we have reduced the presence of unwanted electrical noises that dogged the transmissions of  older media. But they’ve been replaced by relentless and insistent demands on our attention that represent their own forms of noise.